Blog Archive

Friday, April 27, 2012

A visit to ITU in Copenhagen

Copenhagen by mimmi
Copenhagen, a photo by mimmi on Flickr.
I was at ITU in Copenhagen on Tuesday this week to give a talk and to hang out with the great people that ITU consists of. The visit was organised by Sebastian Möring who is looking at metaphores in computer games. It is interesting to consider games and simulations as metaphors - they are so much more far reaching in terms of being complete systems than we normally think of when talking about metaphors. I associate to literature that paraphrases societal structures - in societies where critique cannot be given an author may describe the mechanics of a society but state that it is another, fictional society that is actually described. In such fiction it is obvious to the reader what is described - it seems like we as humans want to ascribe the nature of something as derived from systemic functions and properties.
I enjoyed giving the talk, and appreciated all the good questions I got. And the post-talk dinner :) Here is a description of the talk: http://game.itu.dk/index.php/Game_Lecture:_Players_Imbuing_Meaning:_Co-creation_of_Challenges_in_a_prototype_MMO

I had a good flight. The connection from Malta to Copenhagen was in Rome. I love hearing italian and see how stylish people are there. The airport is overshadowed by a huge Emporio Armani building. ...It was only the fact that my flight connection was quite short that saved my wallet from a pair of Ferragamo flats, I didn’t have time to try them on. On my flight to copenhagen I was busy finishing the preparation of my talk (managed to add a few pictures of otters into the slides), and used one of my best tricks for not being nervous: thinking of the temporality of our existence. It puts things in appropriate perspective.
On my way back I listened to an audiobook about Kant. Julian Togelius’ and Mark Nelson’s recent work (both independently exploring Kant’s categorical imperative through computation) has inspired me to go back to the philosophy classics.